Behind this turnaround, in significant measure, are government policies that helped the financial sector avert collapse and then gave financial firms huge benefits on the path to recovery. For example, the federal government invested hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars in banks — low-cost money that the firms used for high-yielding investments on which they made big profits.

Stabilizing the financial system was considered necessary to prevent an even deeper economic recession. But some critics say the Bush administration, which first moved to bail out Wall Street, and the Obama administration, which ultimately stabilized it, took a far less aggressive approach to helping the American people.

That bolded section is pretty-speak, a bullshit attempt to soften the real problem because it doesn’t favor the leftists big-nanny-staters, for the Frank-Dodd bill was written in such a way that those kissing the right people in government’s asses and paying them off with enough lucre in the form of campaign contributions then could not just get oodles of tax payer money, but also make a veritable killing. And the fools keep blaming the banks and capitalism. In the mean time the crony capitalists are raking in money while those that claim to be the 99 percent rail at the wrong people.

“There’s a very popular conception out there that the bailout was done with a tremendous amount of firepower and focus on saving the largest Wall Street institutions but with very little regard for Main Street,” said Neil Barofsky, the former federal watchdog for the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP, the $700 billion fund used to bail out banks. “That’s actually a very accurate description of what happened.”

Neither the Bush administration nor the Obama administration, for instance, compelled banks to increase lending to consumers, known as “prime borrowers.” Such a step might have spurred spending and growth, although generating demand for loans may have proved difficult in the downturn.

Right, because as we saw before, “compelling” banks to do things, like lending money to people that were so high risk that a default was a “when” not an “if”, never ends badly. These fuckwads miss the point: both TARP and the Dodd-Frank bill were about increasing the power of the political class. And tax payers paid for it.

A recent study by two professors at the University of Michigan found that banks did not significantly increase lending after being bailed out. Rather, they used taxpayer money, in part, to invest in risky securities that profited from short-term price movements. The study found that bailed-out banks increased their investment returns by nearly 10 percent as a result.

Guess which bill gave them permission to do this kind of investments? And which bill required banks to keep an inordinately large amount of cash on hand rather than do anything with it too, leading to less lending amongst things. Which one added a massive layer of bureaucracy & costs, while cutting their profits? And which one is now going to cause more trouble. Don’t:

Some of Wall Street’s success has moderated in recent months, with bank stock prices down and layoffs on the rise. This mostly has reflected the renewed slowdown in the U.S. economy this year and the European debt crisis buffeting global markets.

Representatives of the financial industry say regulations in last year’s Dodd-Frank legislation, which Obama pushed for and signed, also have crimped bank profits. But many analysts think the law will make the financial system more stable. The legislation, for instance, requires banks to maintain a greater capital cushion to withstand losses during bad economic times. The measure also created a regulator whose sole purpose is to police lending to ordinary Americans.

Stable indeed. Less loans, and loans are risky in a collapsing economy, are sure to make the lending industry more stable. Less profits means the consumer pays more for services that before might even have been labeled “free”. And there are far more regulations yet to come which all will have onerous effects and create special needs to go beg politicians for exclusions/exceptions. For the right price, of course. But don’t lose focus. The point is these guys are making a killing right now under Team Obama’s rules.

Compensation at these firms also has bounced back. Financial firms paid about $20.8 billion in bonuses for work done in 2010, according to research by the New York state comptroller. In New York City, the average Wall Street salary last year grew 16.1 percent, to $361,330, which is more than five times the average salary of a private-sector worker in the city.

By contrast, millions of Americans continue to face economic difficulties. That is fueling broad public anger at Wall Street and has given rise to the “Occupy” protest movements nationwide.

And yet, it is these very crooks that are helping Wall Street rake in the money, for a nice cushy fee, that now pretend they are standing firm against Wall Street raking in all that money. And the morons are all falling for it. Helps to have outlets like WaPo fluff up the facts – Wall Street has made more money thanks to Obama in 2 ½ years than they did the previous 8 under evil BoosChimpyMcHitler – like they did in this bullshit piece. The data doesn’t lie though: the rich fat cats are making out better under Obama than they did under Bush, and they are doing it in a down economy. And the rest of us are hurting worse and being told to pony up more money. No amount of smoke can hide that.

I am referring to the conversation I had in the comment section of one or more of our OWS posts here about who we really need to be angry at and blame for our current disastrous situation. When I pointed out that these OWS people where barking at the wrong people and that they and most Americans needed to understand who the real culprits and enablers in this mess are, because they where basically asking the culprits, motivated by the power & money they got making the system dependant on them for favors, I was talking about this. In fact, I specifically mentioned this asshole as one of the biggest perps.

Rep. Barney Frank might sympathize with the Occupy Wall Street protesters, but he’s still got friends in the financial world. The Massachusetts Democrat is heading to New York hoping to raise tens of thousands of dollars Thursday at a fundraiser at the home of Charles Myers, a senior investment banking advisor at Evercore Partners.

Myers is one of several Wall Street execs listed on the invite soliciting up to $2,500 from attendees for Frank’s reelection committee, according to a copy obtained by POLITICO. Frank, the co-author of the sweeping financial regulatory reform bill signed into law last year, said in a recent interview with POLITICO that he didn’t see any conflict between supporting the protests and taking financial services money.

So there you have it. I am against evil Wall Street but I am there raking in their cash! Barney’s Defense?

“If you take money from them, but you don’t vote [for] the things they want, how does that put you in conflict?” Frank questioned.

Fuck, he thinks we are stupid! WTF do you think the Dodd-Frank bill did, huh? And remember that Barney was a huge supporter & enabler of the TARP bank bailouts. Maybe Barney misspoke when he said that he doesn’t vote for the things they want and really meant that even when he gives them the things they want, they end up doing bad. Seriously, does he really want us to believe that these Wall Street execs are too stupid to figure out, after decades of paying big money for Barney’s time, that they are getting nothing, and that they just keep doing it out of desperation or some other motive? And this is the guy you think will fix things for ya? Hah!

Want another laugher?

Frank said he supports the movement “to the extent that they obey the law” and that he wishes “that kind of energy was around two years ago when we were voting on the financial reform bill. We’d have a tougher bill.”

Hah! Obey the law? That’s one huge understatement. I know the LSM has done a bang up job of not reporting how much trouble the various authorities have had with practically every one of the hippy infested OWS groups. Maybe what Barney really means is that he wants to co-opt the energy of these astroturffed events to hold on to that seat that allows him to bend so many people over.

Bank of America will become the first major bank to charge customers across the country a monthly fee to shop with their debit cards, part of a wave of changes that are eroding the low-cost model of banking that consumers have long enjoyed.

The $5 fee will debut next year for the bank’s basic checking accounts. It will apply only to debit card purchases and not to ATM withdrawals, online bill pay or mobile phone transfers. A spokeswoman said the bank is “adjusting our pricing to reflect today’s economics.”

The move is just one of the ways banks are overhauling consumers’ accounts in the wake of the financial crisis, which resulted in a regulatory overhaul for the banking system and a fundamental shift in the industry business model. Rather than charge the riskiest consumers the heftiest fees, banks are now spreading their costs more evenly among their customers.

“Spreading their costs more evenly among their customers”. We knew Obama was going to “spread the wealth around” with government. But who knew he’d make the banks do it too?

What’s going on here is that the Dodd-Frank had a provision inserted by Dick Durbin (D-Best Buy) that cut debit swipe fees from 44 to 24 cents. This shifted several billion dollars from evil banks to wonderful retailers. So the banks are pushing the costs back on us.

Well, you never know what’s going to happen when … actually we fucking did know. I said it. So did everyone else who wasn’t completely in the pocket of retailer lobbyists. But the glorious Democratic Party, defender of the little guy, made sure that retailers got a break on swipe fees at the expense of bank customers.